On Sun, 2020-06-28 at 13:36 +0100, Jonathan Cameron wrote: > Hi All > Hey, I'd be interested in a virtual microconf. Some more notes inline. > Summary: > > Is there enough IIO developer interest in spending a few hours talking > about > IIO topics? Note we may go deep in places but other topics need a wide > range > of people and experience to be useful! > > So, I have thought about trying to organize a workshop / microconf at one > of the > big Linux conferences in the past. However, I've not done anything about > it > because : > > 1. Active IIO developers are geographically spread out, so chances are we > would only get a small subset of people. Whilst that's fine for > having > a few beers/coffee and a chat, it is not so good on an inclusive / > useful basis > for making any progress. Whilst the Linux foundation and others do > their > best to encourage a wide range of people to attend these events, the > reality > is that going to a conference is expensive in money and/or time. > > 2. Whilst I have personally been going to more conferences in recent > times than > I did a few years back, they aren't always 'the right ones' for this > sort > of meeting. > > 3. It wasn't obvious that we would actually have a enough to talk about. > This is more of an issue if it involved people jumping on planes with > all > the issues that brings. > > 4. I've mulled trying something virtual in the past but was unconvinced > we could > do it in fashion that would make it more productive than email > exchanges. > > Anyhow, a huge amount has changed this year. I'm sure everyone is > getting more > used to doing things online and it's clear that useful meetings of this > type > can occur without getting everyone sat around a table. > > Clearly lots of open questions around this: > > * What would we talk about? > > * Are enough people interested? > > * When? Can we actually find a timezone or date that works for enough > people? > Particularly true given mixture of people who do IIO for their day jobs > and > those who do it out of work time! > > Note that, for a first such event I'd suggest we are looking at around > 3 hours. > > * Platform: We could try and associate with an existing event, but as it > will be small > we probably don't need the heavy weight logistics of something like > Plumbers > (side note - their online conferencing setup is very impressive). > > My personal preference is Zoom as it seems more reliable than > alternatives > (even though it's closed source etc... :( Video optional! > > I have a few thoughts on topics (in no particular order) > > 1. Generic process stuff. Should we change how the IIO subsystem is > maintained? > I know I have a few things I'd like to briefly discuss. Note this is > standard > feature in pretty much every open source project microconf! > > 2. Major out of tree patches. > - What is out there? Perhaps there is room to collaborate around some > of this. > - Do we have a path to upstream them? Naturally, I have some interest in this topic. > > 3. Topics on the horizon? Where should we go? > - One topic in here is potentially around virtualization on embedded > platforms and how IIO might fit within that. This [for me] is partially related to 2. But somewhat unrelated [to 2.], we've been discussing internally some ideas about "rapid-prototyping". I know there was something that Intel did a while back on this. We've had some other thoughts, but did not have time to finalize them. > > 4. Mentorship / support of new developers. > - Would love to get some inputs on this from both people who do a lot > of > this and from those who have recently been on the 'newbie' side of > things! > > 5. Usecases. I'd personally love to hear a bit about what people are > actually > doing with all these devices! I'd also be interested in pain points > etc. > > 6. Userspace stacks. More discussion around pain points etc than an > overview of > what there is. > > 7. Testing / emulation? What do people have in place, and what can we > od to > improve it? There's also an internal idea we had, where we can extend the IIO dummy driver [or create a new one], to load data and read-back [as a replay for userspace]. We never got to do it, but would be curios of other did. > > 8+ What do other people want to talk about? > > Some of these topics pretty much require particular people, so we may not > be > able to do them usefully this time. Note the above list may well be > too many topics already so chances are we won't get through everything > people > want to talk about. > > Anyhow, thoughts? > > We can leave the "when" question until we have an idea of whether it > makes > sense to do this at all. > > Jonathan > > p.s. As ever ideally keep discussion on list but if anyone wants to raise > anything > privately feel free to email me directly. >
